Is Your Consultant Enriching Your Judgment — or Retarding it?

(Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and Tom Davenport are at work on a book on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organizational, not just individual, strength. As their research progresses, each is authoring posts in this blog to test-drive ideas and invite input.)

At one point deep into the dialogue of Louis Malle’s 1981 film My Dinner with André, the two characters agree that New York is no longer a thinking, vibrant place, and wonder why people don’t seem eager to escape. Quoting a friend, André submits that the city is a new model of concentration camp, built by the inmates themselves, and where the inmates are the guards. “As a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.”

Regardless of what one thinks of New York, the tirade is memorable. I was reminded of it recently when someone else described a way in which smart people unwittingly conspire to dumb down a place. It was at the close of a presentation I had just given to a global consulting firm’s organization development practice leaders. Having heard about the ideas at the center of our forthcoming book—in which my co-authors and I urge companies to become more information-intensive, analytical, democratic, and deliberative in their judgment calls—one of the senior partners stood up to comment:

I like very much what you’re proposing, and it rings true with the kind of things we see today in many of our clients. Yet I’m bothered as I think about what it means for our own practice. Because our business model is so oriented to serving the CEO—and providing analytical and advisory support to helping him or her with their decision-making—I suspect the work our firm does actually ends up subverting this kind of organizational culture. We end up endorsing, implicitly, the idea that the only decision that matters is that of the CEO, buttressed when necessary by the able consultants. So we’re actually undermining the development of the capability that you suggest is best practice for what we might call ‘the healthy organization.’

The truth of that consultant’s observation hit me like a freight train. When you’re paid to give advice—and help with a decision—you feel accountable for getting it right. So it’s hard to step back and defer to a broader set of processes and culture that are not your own. That means that anyone who plies a trade of “in-sourced intelligence” runs the risk of under-valuing, and even undermining, the deeper sources of knowledge in an organization itself—knowledge that, properly mobilized, could be the foundation of a really sustainable judgment capability.

We all know the old adage: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him all his life. A good consultant wants clients ultimately to be able to make their own good decisions—but the better a client develops the skill for the organization, the less it needs the consultant. So perhaps even well-intentioned consultants unconsciously build, with their clients, their own prisons—a set of invisible bars reinforced by a mindset that leaders always need outside counsel to make any serious decision.

This is not to argue that organizations should ultimately repudiate outside expertise and perspective. Even the most broad-minded and open-boundary organization has occasional limits in expertise, and can suffer from this or that company or cultural bias.

But that said, the more analytical and democratic model of organizational judgment we see as future best practice requires a more sophisticated “both/and” approach to using consultants than many enterprises use today.

It can’t just be a game of “either/or”: choosing to engage a consultant or “deciding for ourselves.” Instead, a wise organization will take advantage of external expertise and perspective, while not abandoning the responsibility to make the final call, and to keep building its own decision-making muscles.

Meanwhile, paid advisors, for all their professional dedication to finding the best answer, need to note that the best-served client is one that becomes more capable of thriving in the long term. That capability doesn’t come when all the right answers emanate from the corner office, and it certainly doesn’t come when a CEO outsources the thinking process. It comes when an organization gains judgment for itself—when it is no longer being handed smart decisions, and no longer needs to be.